This blog contains all my media, marketing and digital columns written for the Eastern Daily Press newspaper, the biggest selling regional morning newspaper in England. I hope you enjoy.

Monday, 24 September 2012

Waitrose and Twitter - A lesson in PR or a lesson in brand management?

One of the more amusing stories in
the last week came from the middle class bastion that is Waitrose. On Monday it
decided to ask its twitter followers to complete the sentence “I shop at
Waitrose because…#WaitroseReasons”. I am sure that some well meaning young
marketing exec had been at a conference about social media and sat in workshops
about engagement; brought that back and thought this was a great idea. The
purist in me would completely agree with him, however the old cynic in me of 20
years hard experience thought light blue paper and stand well back and duly the
firework exploded.

This spread quickly giving us
another example of why this is the nation that gave the world Monty Python and
the Goons. My favourite responses were: “I shop at Waitrose because it makes me
feel important and I absolutely detest being surrounded by poor people” and the
all time classic “I shop at Waitrose because I was once in the Holloway Road branch
and heard a dad say ‘Put the papaya down Orlando!’”

Within the storm of amusing asides
there were positive as well as negative comments which would have pleased
Waitrose but most of the negative ones were based on the clear perception that
Waitrose is expensive and middle class. I suspect the reaction was quite galling
to key executives. Particularly to Waitrose managing director Mark Price who
announced in May that it was going to spend “tens of millions of pounds” to
price match Tesco and back this with a major television campaign in attempt to
show its value compared with competitors.

Many have argued that there is no
such thing as bad PR, however there is if it reinforces a popular perception
that you are trying hard and spending good money to dispel. For me this issue is
not about the gags or whether it’s been good or bad publicly. It’s actually
about the bigger question of what is wrong with being perceived as middle class
and expensive if that is your core audience.

Let me give you an example from
America of the fast food chain
Chick-fil-A. You might not have heard of it but last year it had sales in excess
of £2.5bn. This year it also caused a major storm in the US when
its president told a North Carolina Baptist website that the company supported
the “biblical definition of marriage”. Cue massive debate about its anti-gay
marriage stance. To help understand why he said this, the company was stared by
the Presidents father to run on “biblically based principles”, donates millions
to Christian charities and closes all stores on a Sunday. Although this stance
made it universally unpopular with a vast majority of the US
population it gained massive support from its core audience of Southern Right
Wing Christian Republicans so much so that its restaurants struggled to cope
with demand for the following month.

There lies the example of one of the
most important principles of brand management. It does not matter if you are not
universally well liked by everyone, or if people have a different perception to
reality. It’s about making sure that you drive patronage and loyalty from your
chosen target market and that might mean allowing certain perceptions to stay if
the end result is keeping your profitable customer base happy in their choice of
supermarket.

Tim Youngman is head of digital
marketing for Archant, follow him on twitter
@timyoungman

No comments:

Post a Comment

About Me

My name is Tim Youngman, I am director of marketing for a regional newspaper group in the UK.
This blog contains the columns I write on media, marketing and technology for the Eastern Daily Press newspaper in the UK www.edp24.co.uk England's largest selling regional morning newspaper.
You can find our more about me here:
www.linkedin.com/in/timyoungman
and follow me on twitter @timyoungman